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"Based on what we're picking up in the surface search area, we are narrowing down the over-sea area where we believe with a high level of confidence the black box recorder from MH370 is located," Mr Abbott told Chinese media in Beijing on Saturday.

"The surface search area is still about 50 kilometres by 40 kilometres, where we're looking for possible debris.

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"The object of all this is to get as much transmission as we can from the fast-fading black box recorder.

"When we think we've got everything we can through this means, we will deploy a submersible. By that stage we hope we will have narrowed the search area on the sea bed to as little perhaps as a square kilometre."

"We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres": Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Friday. Photo: AP

Earlier on Saturday Mr Abbott said although Australian authorities had "a high degree of confidence" the transmissions detected by ADV Ocean Shield were from flight MH370's black box, they still faced an incredibly difficult task ahead.

"Trying to locate anything 4.5 kilometres beneath the surface of the ocean, about 1000 kilometres from land is a massive, massive task and it is likely to continue for a long time to come."

By air and sea, search crews scoured a remote area of the Indian Ocean about 41,393 square kilometres in size, the centre of the range located about 2331 kilometres north-west of Perth, on Saturday.

As many as nine military aircraft, a civilian jet and 14 ships were tasked with the day’s search. ADV Ocean shield was continuing "more focused sweeps with the towed pinger locator to try and locate further signals" the search's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said in a statement on Saturday.

There have been no confirmed signal detections in the past 24 hours, JACC stated.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority also narrowed the overall search area overnight to 41,393 square kilometres on Saturday from Friday’s search area of 46,713.

The size of the underwater search field for the black box, being investigated by ADV Ocean Shield, HMS Echo and RAAF aircraft, had not previously been confirmed.

After ADV Ocean Shield detected the first two signals, now confirmed by experts to be consistent with an aircraft black box, the ship started performing a slow, square sweep of an area about 1800 metres long.